Note: These features do not seem to exist on GW. (Not that I miss them since I don’t feel a need to use them myself.)
Questions: Is anyone using these features at all? Oh I see you said earlier “a couple people very briefly tried using them”. Do you know why they stopped? Do you think you overestimated how many people would use it, in a way that could have been corrected (for example by surveying potential users or paying more attention to skeptical voices)? (To be fair, upon reviewing the comments on your Archipelago posts, there weren’t that many skeptical voices, although I did upvote this one.) Given that you spend several months on Archipelago, it seems useful to do a quick postmortem on lessons learned?
Each of the features has been used a bit, even recently. (I think there’s 3-7 people who’ve set some kind of intentional moderation style and/or guideline, and at least one person who’s banned a user from their posts recently).
I think the moderation guidelines help to set expectations and the small bit of counterfactual threat of banning helps lend them a bit of force.
The features were also a pre-requisite for Eliezer posting and/or allowing admins to do crossposts on his behalf (I doubt we would have prioritized them as hard without that, although I’d been developing the archipelago-concept-as-applied-to-lesswrong before then)
So I don’t consider the features a failure, so much as “they didn’t have this outsized, qualitatively different benefit” that I was hoping for.
The features were also a pre-requisite for Eliezer posting and/or allowing admins to do crossposts on his behalf (I doubt we would have prioritized them as hard without that, although I’d been developing the archipelago-concept-as-applied-to-lesswrong before then)
Yet Eliezer still isn’t participating on Less Wrong… is there some reason for that? Were the implemented features insufficient? Is there still something left to do?
The moderation tools were a prerequisite even for the degree of Eliezer participation you currently see (where periodically Robby crossposts things on his behalf), which I still consider quite worth it.
As Richard notes, Eliezer isn’t really participating in online discussion these days and that looks unlikely to change.
That makes it even worse, if true! If he doesn’t post anywhere, then he wasn’t ever going to post here, so what in the world was the point of all these changes and features and all that stuff that was allegedly “so that Eliezer would post here”?!
Re: GW – obviously the GW team has limited time, but there shouldn’t be anything stopping them from implementing these features. And in the meanwhile, if you hop over to lesswrong.com to use a feature (such as deleting a comment or banning .a user) it should have the desired effect over on greaterwrong.
I do expect, as the LW team tries more and more experimental things that are designed to radically change the shape of the site, that the GW experience will start to feel a bit confusing, depending on how much time the GW team has to implement things.
[note to GW team: I know at least part of the problem is that the LW team hasn’t been that proactive about communicating our plans. My current impression is that you’re sufficiently bottlenecked on dev-time that doing so wouldn’t really help, but if you thought otherwise I could maybe arrange for that]
One recent example are Related Questions, which I expect to be a major component of how the questions feature (and the site overall) ends up working. The greaterwrong version of this question doesn’t show it’s parent question, either at the top of the page or in a list further down, which changes the context of the question quite a bit. See the lesswrong version).
(Related questions overall are still in a “soft beta” where we’re still tweaking them a bunch and aren’t confident that they’re usable enough to really advertise, but I expect that to change within a couple weeks)
It is true that we’re bottlenecked on developer time, yes. We wouldn’t say no to more communication of the LW team’s plans, of course, but that is indeed not a major problem at this time, as far as I can tell.
One thing that would be quite useful would be a maintained centralized list of LW features (preferably in order of when they were added, and with links to documentation… a Blizzard-style list of “patch notes”, in other words, aggregated into a change history, and kept somewhere central and easy to find).
If, perhaps, this were a post that were to be updated as new features rolled in, we could use it as a way to track GW vs. LW feature parity (via comments and updating of the post itself), and as a publicly visible roadmap for same.
I think the recently published FAQ has almost all of our features, though not in an easily skimmable or accessable format. But definitely better than what we had before it.
Knowing your plans could definitely make a difference—I do want to prioritize fixing any problems that make GW confusing to use, as well as adding features that someone has directly asked for. As such, I just implemented the related questions feature.
I think another major issue is going to be custom commenting-guidelines, which GreaterWrong doesn’t have AFAICT.
Right now, custom commenting guidelines aren’t actually all that clear on LW, and I don’t think people rely on them much. But we’ve been talking about making guidelines and moderation-policies appear next to commenting boxes as soon as you start typing, or otherwise making it more visually distinct what the norms of a given discussion section is.
If we ended up learning harder into the archipelago model, this would become particularly important.
Note: These features do not seem to exist on GW. (Not that I miss them since I don’t feel a need to use them myself.)
Questions: Is anyone using these features at all? Oh I see you said earlier “a couple people very briefly tried using them”. Do you know why they stopped? Do you think you overestimated how many people would use it, in a way that could have been corrected (for example by surveying potential users or paying more attention to skeptical voices)? (To be fair, upon reviewing the comments on your Archipelago posts, there weren’t that many skeptical voices, although I did upvote this one.) Given that you spend several months on Archipelago, it seems useful to do a quick postmortem on lessons learned?
Each of the features has been used a bit, even recently. (I think there’s 3-7 people who’ve set some kind of intentional moderation style and/or guideline, and at least one person who’s banned a user from their posts recently).
I think the moderation guidelines help to set expectations and the small bit of counterfactual threat of banning helps lend them a bit of force.
The features were also a pre-requisite for Eliezer posting and/or allowing admins to do crossposts on his behalf (I doubt we would have prioritized them as hard without that, although I’d been developing the archipelago-concept-as-applied-to-lesswrong before then)
So I don’t consider the features a failure, so much as “they didn’t have this outsized, qualitatively different benefit” that I was hoping for.
Yet Eliezer still isn’t participating on Less Wrong… is there some reason for that? Were the implemented features insufficient? Is there still something left to do?
The moderation tools were a prerequisite even for the degree of Eliezer participation you currently see (where periodically Robby crossposts things on his behalf), which I still consider quite worth it.
As Richard notes, Eliezer isn’t really participating in online discussion these days and that looks unlikely to change.
Does Eliezer post anywhere public these days? His postings to Facebook are infrequent, and I don’t know of him posting anywhere else.
That makes it even worse, if true! If he doesn’t post anywhere, then he wasn’t ever going to post here, so what in the world was the point of all these changes and features and all that stuff that was allegedly “so that Eliezer would post here”?!
He seems to post on Twitter pretty frequently...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Re: GW – obviously the GW team has limited time, but there shouldn’t be anything stopping them from implementing these features. And in the meanwhile, if you hop over to lesswrong.com to use a feature (such as deleting a comment or banning .a user) it should have the desired effect over on greaterwrong.
I do expect, as the LW team tries more and more experimental things that are designed to radically change the shape of the site, that the GW experience will start to feel a bit confusing, depending on how much time the GW team has to implement things.
[note to GW team: I know at least part of the problem is that the LW team hasn’t been that proactive about communicating our plans. My current impression is that you’re sufficiently bottlenecked on dev-time that doing so wouldn’t really help, but if you thought otherwise I could maybe arrange for that]
One recent example are Related Questions, which I expect to be a major component of how the questions feature (and the site overall) ends up working. The greaterwrong version of this question doesn’t show it’s parent question, either at the top of the page or in a list further down, which changes the context of the question quite a bit. See the lesswrong version).
(Related questions overall are still in a “soft beta” where we’re still tweaking them a bunch and aren’t confident that they’re usable enough to really advertise, but I expect that to change within a couple weeks)
It is true that we’re bottlenecked on developer time, yes. We wouldn’t say no to more communication of the LW team’s plans, of course, but that is indeed not a major problem at this time, as far as I can tell.
One thing that would be quite useful would be a maintained centralized list of LW features (preferably in order of when they were added, and with links to documentation… a Blizzard-style list of “patch notes”, in other words, aggregated into a change history, and kept somewhere central and easy to find).
If, perhaps, this were a post that were to be updated as new features rolled in, we could use it as a way to track GW vs. LW feature parity (via comments and updating of the post itself), and as a publicly visible roadmap for same.
I think the recently published FAQ has almost all of our features, though not in an easily skimmable or accessable format. But definitely better than what we had before it.
Agree having a proper list would be good.
Knowing your plans could definitely make a difference—I do want to prioritize fixing any problems that make GW confusing to use, as well as adding features that someone has directly asked for. As such, I just implemented the related questions feature.
Thanks! (missed this the first time around)
I think another major issue is going to be custom commenting-guidelines, which GreaterWrong doesn’t have AFAICT.
Right now, custom commenting guidelines aren’t actually all that clear on LW, and I don’t think people rely on them much. But we’ve been talking about making guidelines and moderation-policies appear next to commenting boxes as soon as you start typing, or otherwise making it more visually distinct what the norms of a given discussion section is.
If we ended up learning harder into the archipelago model, this would become particularly important.
Yup. This post is essentially the result of that post-mortem.